Tag Archives: idea development

After the presentation I threw around a few ideas about maybe demonstrating hype by creating our own curiosity experiment and then counting how many people checked it out. I don’t know exactly how this will help our problem (see posts below) but it’ll be a way of making people come to our feature and make a point about how the media are inadvertently advertising the black marketplace through a hit counter or something.

In the meantime I found that one of the websites that lists the instructions of how to get onto the Silk Road website had tracking widgets on their sidebar. The uselessly named ‘mainstream los’ blog not only features really aggressively named songs on a playlist, but also has a graphic tracking where all the visitors come from and presenting this information visually.

If we do something similar we could use what this blog used and use a 3rd party service such as FlagCounter to monitor traffic coming to our mock website. It even tells us which of these people are from Australia so that would help with the cause/effect issues of such an experiment. Just an idea.

Media Hype – how the media have ironically resulted in the site having more users. I guess they kind of act like a indirect marketing/PR tool for the site.

Anonymity – The ways in which people are being sneaky about it always fascinates me. But then there are also limits it it since Tor crashed and the AFP says that they can track importers. Also, d. boyd’s (2008) notion of “security through obscurity” could be an interesting way of thinking about Silk Road anonymity too.

There are more but I’ve run out of the word limit for this post… Where is my eureka moment?